The Metamorphosis of Enterprise Content Management

Image by Luna sin Estrella, used under Creative Commons 2.0.

Regardless of what you’ve been hearing, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not dead. For years ECM has been harangued as being overly cumbersome, overly expensive, overly difficult, and underwhelming when it came to delivering benefits. That’s all about to change…

The manner in which ECM is delivered is going to change. Taking a cue from what consumers have come to expect in terms of the technology they use for personal reasons, a subset of Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) vendors, led by Box, are emerging as purveyors of ECMnext – the next generation of Enterprise Content Management platforms. The focus is on how and why people create, consume, and share content, supported by a foundation that provides the security and governance required in today’s digital business environment.

This whitepaper explores the short-comings of legacy ECM platforms, and how ECMnext vendors can step up and deliver what we’ve wanted out of ECM all along. While there’s still a ways to go for ECMnext platforms to be able to completely replace legacy ECM platforms, the basic building blocks are in place and the roadmaps are pointing in the right direction.